Cesspool of ignominy
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
This company will do you no good. It won’t be prosperous to your career and there are good chances that your career will actually get damaged or even destroyed along the way.
Take a good and very thorough look at the company reviews from an employee’s perspective (Kununu, Glassdoor) as well as from a customer’s perspective (Trustpilot, Better Business Bureau, ...) and then ask yourself: do I REALLY want to work for THAT company? I believe that the answer to this question is self-explanatory.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
Among those companies that I have worked for during my career, Wirecard easily claims the doubtful accolade of being the worst choice ever when it comes to having a career as an IT professional. Despite the company’s reputation of being one of the experienced veterans in the payment business (that assessment is mainly based on self-advertisement), the large majority of employees don’t have any clue about payment industry basics, its associated processes and requirements as well as mere core IT basics.
The rare breed of experienced employee at Wirecard is kept small (career- and salary-wise). Usually, your team’s manager tries to avoid annual pay raises. If you try to force a pay raise out of your manager, he’ll give you a tearful speech about your salary raise being extraordinary high in comparison to your colleagues’ pay raises (hilarious performance - I always wondered if this is part of the Wirecard managerial training). In most cases, they rather decide to ‘promote’ you - which is a) usually pointless as promotions don’t come with a raise and b) job titles at Wirecard are utterly meaningless. But putting you in for a promotion ‘puts you in their debt’ - so they think.
Kommunikation
Sharing knowledge and especially establishing a good level of openness and trust in inter-company communications is neither encouraged nor desired; in fact, your manager will resent any attempts of establishing a trusted communication process within the companies’ departments and is going to reprimand you in most of the cases. I never got this part and why it was deemed ‘inappropriate’ to inform your stakeholders properly on project statuses etc. Perhaps, the people at Wirecard do consider this approach as general weakness which needs to be avoided at all costs. Keep in mind that the company is a shark tank in a highly Darwinian environment.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
Your career growth (if there is actually such a thing) is heavily dependent on whether your manager likes you or not. Agreed: this is also the case at other companies - but at Wirecard, this is crucial and a bane to your whole existence. If you make the mistake of joining Wirecard, get to know your manager asap and get him to like you A LOT - otherwise, you have just terminated your career prospects. Never forget that this company is powered by pure cronyism and a despicable ‘I-know-everything-about-your-skeletons-in-the-closet’ attitude.
Career-wise, you will not be able to progress one iota forward unless your manager supports your move. And if you don’t manage to get along with your manager and then try to switch to a different role in Wirecard, be prepared to be forced out of the company by your people manager. In most of the cases, the manager will simply block your move to the team that was initially happy to hire you. You’ll get ghosted or may even have to face false accusations, public insults - the whole shebang. In any way, your career at Wirecard will come to a grinding halt and you won’t be able to recover from it.
Arbeitsbedingungen
Finding a good people manager at Wirecard is as realistic as finding a crock of gold at the end of a rainbow. Most of the managerial posts have been assigned to people which have been with the company for 10+ years - regardless of whether they possess the necessary people managerial skills for such a role. These people have learned ‘to play the game’ which usually consists of becoming your boss’ best friend - and sacrificing fellow colleagues on your way to the next rung up the ladder. Fox Mulder from the X-Files could be working in their basement as ‘trust no one’ is literally the essential motto at Wirecard if you intend to survive your tenure. Don’t rely on verbal agreements as your manager will either ‘forget’ about having made those to you - or he might even call you a liar in front of your team mates. As written agreements are harder for them to dodge, they usually refrain from giving you anything in writing. But ultimately, they will break those agreements as well.
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
Despite the company’s financial value on the market, the salaries are mediocre at best (in comparison to other Munich-based companies). Yes, they also pay you an annual personal bonus. And yes, that bonus is 100% dependent on whether your are your manager’s golden boy or not - regardless of what has been agreed to as part of their annual goals process. Note that your bonus does not include e.g. company stock such as RSU’s.
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HR are well aware of the dreadful situation. As the employee attrition rate seems to be quite high (there were rumors about 30% percent employee loss per year), HR do their best to cope with the situation by trying to fill the void by hiring people from across the globe. Hiring criteria is mostly not based on their qualification but rather on the exploitation of EU Blue Card applicants. Yet, they face a vicious cycle as the issue is deeply embedded within the companies’ core DNA. And unless you decide to cull all company managers up to the highest level, you won’t be able to eradicate the root cause of what is going wrong at Wirecard. Ultimately, HR are bound to be part of the game - you won’t bite the hand that feeds you. As a result, employee feedbacks on Kununu and Glassdoor which are deemed non-favorable seem to have a ‘limited life span’. Some folks in my department have actually turned this recurring task of creating decentralized review backups into a sport before these reviews ‘accidentally’ vanish from those sites. In order to keep the e.g. Glassdoor company ratings up, some chap (usually from India) is then to post a company review where everything is glorified.
Karriere/Weiterbildung
If you intend to use Wirecard as a mere career stepping stone, don’t plan on staying longer than two years. Ensure to have an exit plan before you join them. A large chunk of Wirecard’s employees are inexperienced in the payment processing area - so don’t be surprised to encounter questions like “what is a credit card”. Apart from some very generic credit card basics, you won’t be able to learn anything but rather work on tedious and repetitive ops-related tasks as most of the company’s systems are duct-taped. 99% of your time will be occupied by ops-related tasks.
Get some feedback on your future department before you join. Don’t talk to the lobotomized “Wirecard is awesome” lemming who has been with the company for 10+ years but rather talk to the average Joe instead. You’ll recognize these people very easily - usually, they are the ones that look miserable all the time. 80% of the company’s employees seem to be from other countries all across the globe (which is actually one of the few good things that can be said about about the company). These poor schmucks have fallen victim to Wirecard’s EU work visa sponsorship - which will tie them to the company for the next 2 or 3 yrs